"Yes! I understand all that, brigadier; I thought as much; so I hurried to come here. It is very hard to leave your old ways and come to live among strangers at your age; that paralyzes one's arm. Such occasions change one's ideas. Here is the key of my cottage and the book of estimations; you have also your register and the stamping hammer. Well, do you know what I would do in your place? I would take everything to our chief inspector, because the Oberförster of Zornstadt might ask you for them and force you to give them up. When they are deposited with M. Laroche no one will have anything more to say to you. While you are away Marie-Rose will wash the windows and the floor; Calas will go with Starck to get the wood, the fodder, and the potatoes, and I will undertake to arrange the furniture and to put everything in order."
He spoke with so much good sense that I followed his advice. We went down into the large room, and though it is not my habit, we took a good glass of brandy together; after which I set out, the register under my blouse, the hammer in my pocket, and a stout stick in my hand. It was my last journey through the country on affairs connected with the service. The pool of Frohmithle was frozen over; the flour-mill and the saw-mill lower down had ceased to go. No one, since the day before, had followed my path; all seemed desolate; for three hours I did not see a soul.
Then, remembering the smoke from the charcoal kilns, the sound of the wood-cutters' hatchets working in the clearings, lopping the trees, piling up the fagots beside the forest paths, even in mid-winter, all that formerly gay life, that profit that gave food and happiness to the smallest hamlets, I said to myself that the robbers, who were capable of troubling such order to appropriate wrongfully the fruit of the labour of others, ought to be hanged.
And from time to time, in the midst of the silence, seeing a sparrow-hawk pass on his large wings, his claws drawn up under his stomach and uttering his war cry, I thought:
"That is like the Prussians! They have got the Germans in their claws; they have given them officers who will cudgel them; instead of working, those people are forced to spend their last penny in the war, and the others have always their beaks and claws in their flesh; they pluck them leisurely, without their being able to defend themselves. Woe to us all! The noble Prussians will devour us; and the Badeners, the Bavarians, the Würtembergers, and the Hessians with us!"
Those melancholy ideas, and many others of the same kind, passed through my mind. About ten o'clock I ascended the stairs of the old fort, abandoned since the beginning of the war; then descending the Rue du Faubourg, I entered the house of the chief inspector. But the office door in the vestibule at the left was closed; I rang and tried to open the door, but no one came. I was going out to ask one of the neighbours what had become of M. Laroche, and whether he had been obliged to go away, when an upper door opened, and the chief inspector himself appeared on the stairs in his dressing-gown.
XXI
"Who is there?" said M. Laroche, not recognising me at first under my broad-brimmed felt hat.
"It is I, sir," I answered.
"Ah! it is you, Father Frederick!" said he, quite rejoiced. "Well, come up stairs. All my household has departed, I am here alone; they bring me my meals from the Grapes Inn. Come in, come in!"